Live More Fear Less

Photo by Lan Gao

This week I’m writing from the top of the gondola in Queenstown, watching the group of kids that I’m with zooming down the luge.

It’s hardly tropical as I watch, and the wind chill must be less than zero.

Yet the kids are all happily zooming past… most in shorts, a couple in tee shirts. We told them to dress warmly but they’ve somehow missed the memo. It’s not stopping them from taking each and every one of their 5 allotted runs.

Around us there are AJ Hackett signs saying things like Live More, Fear Less. And I’m wondering where and when, we, as adults, lost this impulse. The students in front of me appear to not even know that living more and fearing less is even a thing. They’re doing it already, in spades, and relishing and thriving as a result of it.

At the same time I’m wondering what The Science of Learning would make of all this. I’ve just read Megan Gallagher’s excellent blog, The Science.

In it she bemoans this monolithic like culture shift that has suddenly become a “thing” in our world of education. It suggests there is a silver bullet called THE Science of learning – a one size fits all approach even – and that it will be the answer to all our education woes.

There’s nothing wrong with a solid and robust science approach to education. But I do wonder what governments will say as they get the bill for the cost of it all. I’m pretty sure The Science of Learning will be expensive. Not only will it require major investment in teacher training, but also in class sizes, physical infrastructure, social housing, access to cheap and equitable health systems, healthy foods, the well being of all, the resolving of years of cultural trauma – the list goes on. You know, all that stuff that needs to be sorted so that all of our kids get educated on an equal and equitable footing from day one.

In the meantime, as the kids from my school whizz pass me, oblivious to this thing called the Science of Learning, I wonder again if AJ Hackett and his marketing team have got it right; Live More, Fear Less.

Maybe this is what “the science” will actually say once all the research is done, and analysed, and the findings have tried to be implemented on a shoe string, because that’s what governments do. And we find that the science of Learning isn’t just found in the four walls of a building and a strict curriculum, but in everything that we touch around us. Maybe we’ll find that if we provide more opportunities to live more and fear less that everything will be just fine. Maybe.

I wonder how long it’ll take for the science to say this? And then I wonder what we’ll do with this information?

Steve